The Dead Sea scrolls need a serious re-examination by modern scholars not biased towards mainstream Christianity, similar to the work on Jesus mythicism that has been done over the past 20 years that draws on Gnostic, Essene, and other historically contemporary sources. John Allegro's work on the Dead Sea scrolls needs a non-biased re-examination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allegro
The Christian bias on scroll scholarship was widely corrected in the 90s with the Scrolls' public release. Since then Jewish scholarship of the Scrolls has contributed an enormous amount, cf. Lawrence Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, et al.
> Nobody really cared as the blacksmith, farm hand, or the secretary lost jobs.
I am not sure where you got that impression. The loss of blacksmith (and nailmaker, etc.) and farm hand jobs in 19th century England was a huge social issue (hundreds of thousands of people starved to death after being thrown out of work in England alone; over a million if you count the displacement that lead to the Irish famines), with regular government inquiries, newspaper coverage, and many, many books written about it.
In particular, there was a very famous book, called Capital, written by Karl Marx, that, among other things, points out that popular anti-automation anxiety goes back much farther than the Luddite movement:
> In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the work-people against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings… Abbé Launcelloti, in a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows: "Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned." In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the riots of the ribbon-weavers at length compelled the Town Council to prohibit it… After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639, etc., the States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used, under certain conditions, by the decree of the 15th December, 1661. It was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its introduction into England was causing disturbances among the work-people. By an imperial Edict of 19th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burnt in public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI, on 9th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine [the ribbon-loom], which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and power-loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century… About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright's scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century [19th], chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. [footnote: In old-fashioned manufactures the revolts of the workpeople against machinery, even to this day, occasionally assume a savage character, as in the case of the Sheffield file cutters in 1865].
> Right now people view automation technology as being very expensive but if you look at trends in automation technology the price of that technology is actually declining so even small businesses can utilize the same technology as the mega corporations of the world.
The computer is the greatest automation tool for office work, and that scenario is obviously not the case if you look at what happened to the PC revolution. Local area networks with various file and application servers were a huge market for small and medium sized businesses, and there was lots of hype similar to what you are describing. Now everyone is back to centralizing on virtualized remotely leased computers, just like small and medium sized businesses used leased time-shared (and for IBM 370 series, virtualized) remote mainframes in the 1970s.
Same thing happened with the centralization of the automobile industry in the 1910s, and is happening today in the centralization of agriculture: better combines, tractors, Round-Up pesticides etc. are all available to family farmers, which are all being bankrupted by large factory farms.
> The elites used to pay people to stand around and practically wipe their arses, that quickly diffused as more markets developed, and there were other, better things to do.
That trend is very cyclical and depends on the state of the inequality in the economy, not on automation. Marx observed that the number of servants in England increased dramatically during the height of the industrial revolution:
> The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackets, etc. [footnote: Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords' preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921.]
Capital volume I, chapter 15.
The same thing has been going on in the last 25 years: elderly caretakers, nannies, personal shoppers, personal assistants, virtual assistants, personal chefs, personal trainers, food delivery persons, package delivery persons (especially Amazon contractors), Lyft/Uber drivers, dog walkers, pet sitters, pet groomers, etc.
> For most of history economies were fighting against scarcity, working to produce as much as possible to keep people alive. It is only in the past 100 years that we have had a problem with too much productive capacity.
That really does not describe hunter-gatherer or feudal economies. And it's not even true for capitalist economies: for instance, there were periodic gluts of cotton (1820s, 1860s), or in the textile products made from cotton (1850s, during a global economic crisis). Famine has different causes, independent of the economy: either deliberately caused by forced displacement (ex: Irish famine), or a result of local weather patterns (for any geographic region, there will be a weather event, like drought or late/early frost, that will cause harvest failure roughly every 15 years). Improved shipping, which in a positive feedback loop was the cause of and response to increased trade, is largely what is responsible for eliminating famine. You first of all need to be able to ship grain to a region that is experiencing famine (agricultural over-production in a different region does nothing to prevent people from starving to death otherwise), and the region experiencing the famine has to have something to trade for the grain (people have, and continue to, starve to death in places that experience agricultural surpluses).
The "rich will just live on their land without workers" seems like a hypothetical scenario, but it actually happened a few times during the colonization of the Western United States and Australia (post-Native American/Australian genocide). Marx has an interesting note on this in chapter 33 of volume I of Capital:
> It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother-country… First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative - the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river." (E. G. Wakefield. "England And America," vol.ii, p. 33)
In the United States, the slave labor system kept the workers from subjecting their masters to this "violation" of property rights. There are many historical records of European colonists running away from indentured labor to join Native Americans (the reverse does not seem to have ever happened).
The wealthy need poor laborers a lot more than vice-versa. What is really happening with automation is that it is being used to build militarized police states around the world that keep the poor from squatting the land held by the rich, to force the poor to work for the benefit of the rich (for example, someone is going to have to keep working on oil extraction for a long time to come, even if all the farming will be done by robotic tractors). A police state forcing people into wage slavery is the necessary precondition for the "rich live in automated luxury" scenario to occur.
> How about employment stability? Used to be more common that you'd work at the same job your whole career, be rewarded for your dedication and seniority.
Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.
It is instructive to read Marx to answer this question. How much time do working people need to work every day to earn enough to reproduce themselves? College education is now expected for many jobs (working people reproducing themselves means the next generation having access to similar jobs). How big of a fraction of median income does a median college degree cost? What about healthcare, rent/home prices? Food and clothing prices have declined a lot, but the other prices have risen to a much greater proportion of median income. How many people are now working two or more "part-time" jobs for a total of more than 40 hours a week?
I'm more than happy to answer your questions, at least insofar as you are inquiring about facts:
> How much time do working people need to work every day to earn enough to reproduce themselves?
The Economist article linked above says that adjusted for inflation and taxes, less than one fifth as many people struggle to do so as compared to 40 years ago. Sure, it's valid to say that the percentage of people that experience that struggle (~3-4%) is still a figure that is unacceptably high. But it has been a drastic reduction from what it was four decades earlier (over 15%).
> College education is now expected for many jobs (working people reproducing themselves means the next generation having access to similar jobs).
A strange observation to make, seeing as the non-college educated reproduce at a greater rate than those who do.[1]
> What about healthcare, rent/home prices?
I mention that those are exceptions to the overall trend, but also explain that those are due to well known reasons: a large ageing generation, and an unwillingness to build housing in many growing metro areas. They are not cause by inequality, though good arguments can be made that they exacerbate it.
> Food and clothing prices have declined a lot, but the other prices have risen to a much greater proportion of median income.
Sure, some things like housing have gotten more expensive. But plenty of others have gotten cheaper. In aggregate, costs are going down. That's what the Economist article I linked above explains.
> How many people are now working two or more "part-time" jobs for a total of more than 40 hours a week?
People are spending less time on work on average.[2]
Average time worked is a terrible metric to use without context. Can you provide the context of the chart?
It could be argued that people are working less because of increases in automation and more schooling and a switch from shift jobs to non-shift jobs. Reportedly someone on salary would say they work 40 hours or would be assumed - we know the reality is different than that.
Just because something is possible does not mean it is common. Why didn't all the hard-working software entrepreneurs from the 1980s end up like Bill Gates? Discounting luck and good timing leads to the Horatio Alger fallacy.
